Handling Google Accounts when Staff and Students Leave

Although the old saying “You can’t take it with you” is meant to apply to money and death, it could just a well apply to Google Apps accounts. Because Google Apps for Education accounts are tied to your school district, when a staff member or student leaves, they are not able to take their school issued Google account with them.

My school district has just finished our first full year with Google Apps, so we had to consider this issue this summer. Over time, staff and students may create and collect a large number of valuable documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails, sites, and more. What should we do when a staff member retires or resigns? What should be done when a student graduates or moves away?

When I attended the Google Apps conference in Columbus, Ohio this past spring, I heard Jaime Casap (Google Education Senior Evangelist) say that he hopes a time will come when Google Apps accounts can be easily transferable and the identity that a student or staff member creates will be able to continue on outside of the Apps for Ed system. I agree that it would be very helpful for Google to find a way to link the multiple Google accounts that a person might create from all their areas of life.

In the meantime we need to provide our staff and students with some options. Below are some ideas we have pulled together as we have been working through this issue.

In general, when a staff member or student permanently leaves our school district, they have three options for the data and files they have collected through our various systems:

They can move some data and files to other colleagues in our system who may be able to use them.

They can move some data and files out of our system to keep on their own.

They can leave some data and files for us to delete.

Option #1 - Transferring data and files to other users:

One option in this approach is for the user to share and transfer ownership of certain files to other users. Simply sharing the files is not enough, or else when the original account is deleted, the files will be deleted as well. The basic steps would be:

First, share the documents or files with another user as you normally would.

Next go into the sharing settings for each item, locate the person you shared with, and switch their edit options from “Can Edit” to “Is Owner”

Now that person is the owner of that item.

Another option is for the Google Apps administrator to transfer all of a users documents to another user. The new user could be another staff member in that department or could simply be a generic catch-all account to hold the documents for later processing. To do this a Google Apps admin does the following:

Log into the Google Apps control panel

Click the “Advanced tools” tab

Scroll to the bottom to the section titled “Document ownership transfer”

Option #2 - Moving data and files out of Google Apps for the user to personally keep

As easy as it is to import and create content in Google Apps, Google also makes sure you can export your data if you wish. To that end, Google has set up a site amusingly called the Data Liberation Front at http://www.dataliberation.org/

At that site Google has instructions and/or links to instructions on how to export your data from about 30 different Google services. Below are some ideas from the Data Liberation site and other resources concerning the most common Google services.

Gmail

For a small number of Gmail messages, the easiest option is to forward those messages to a personal account.

As an example, below is a link to the first version of the letter we are giving our leaving staff this summer about what to do with their Google Apps data. It has some directions that are specific to our district, but it still may have useful as a reference.

As another (very nice) example, here is a link to a document created and shared by Vinnie Vrotny from North Shore Country Day School. It has his excellent directions (with pictures) to help his users that are leaving to move their data out of Google Apps: